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Vladimir Nabokov’s ringside vision of art and life

“Everything plays” – an essay published here for the first time in English

Published: 1 August 2012

A
ccording to the distinguished 1930s novelist Sebastian Knight, “the only real
number is one”; and Knight’s creator, Vladimir Nabokov, liked in his later
years to tell interviewers that he “had never belonged to any club or
group”. But this is not strictly true. As a young writer in the émigré
Berlin of the early 1920s, Nabokov was a member of a number of literary
clubs, the most significant being the circle formed around the dominant
critic of the Berlin Russian emigration, Iulii Aikhenvald – the man who
first recognized Nabokov’s talent and seems to have been his early mentor.

Nabokov read out many of his early novels, poems, and plays to the Aikhenvald
circle, and gave talks on Pushkin, Gogol, Blok, Soviet literature, Freud,
Conrad, “Generalities”, and “Man and Things”. But the topic he chose for his
first paper, given in December 1925, was boxing, and specifically the
heavyweight boxing match that had just taken place on December 1 between the
German Hans Breitensträter and the Basque Paolino Uzcudun, before an
audience of 15,000 at the Sports Palace in Berlin. The talk was published as
“Breitensträter–Paolino” on December 28 and 29 in the Latvian émigré journal
Slovo, then forgotten until it was unearthed and reprinted in the early
1990s, in Daugava (Riga), then in Nabokov’s Collected Works in Russian.

Nabokov was a devotee of sports and games, ranging from boxing, football and
tennis, through chess and cryptic crosswords, to the play of thought,
language, desire, art, and the divine universe – those more abstract forms
of play that he invokes at the beginning of “Breitensträter– Paolino”,
sounding, for all the world, like a Presocratic philosopher, only one come
to declare not that all is air, water, earth, or fire, but that all is play.
Never again would he express so openly and nakedly this vision of life and
art as play, which would govern his work for the next fifty years; no wonder
that Nabokov, who later said an artist is lost when he seeks to define art,
should have let the piece lie hidden in the archives of the emigration.

As a young man Nabokov had taken boxing lessons from a “wonderful rubbery
Frenchman, Monsieur Loustatot”, fondly remembered in his autobiography,
Speak, Memory; he boxed competitively as an undergraduate at Cambridge; and
in Berlin he and his friend George Hessen staged a number of bouts. In 1924,
he published a poem called “The Boxer’s Girlfriend”, and in his first major
work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (see below), the protagonist, Morn, talks
about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a
“comma”, a jab a “full stop”.

Of all the sports Nabokov could have chosen to focus on, he took in boxing the
one that concentrates as no other the pain and violence he always saw in
play. But “Breitensträter–Paolino” is a very literary and verbal account of
boxing – the author’s red ink seeping across a skein of metaphor into the
blood on the referee’s vest – and is punctuated according to the varying
rhythms and geometries of the sport: its quick flurries, its wary circlings,
its duelling antitheses. In our translation we have tried to do justice to
Nabokov’s dashes, staccato or metaphysical, his commas, apprehensive or
explosive, and his inversions, abstract or gutsy, all so important in a
piece devoted to testing how far art can go in formalizing even those parts
of life that might seem most resistant – even boxing, even blood and pain.
We have also tried to catch those moments, so far from the oracular
pronouncements of the opening, in which Nabokov mimics the brusque
street-talk of the boxing fan or commentator, mixing his voice with the
voices of the crowd – a democratic ventriloquism unique in his work.

But it would be a mistake to take that voice and its cold indifference to pain
as “Nabokov’s own”, any more than we should identify Nabokov with Humbert
Humbert, or for that matter with the “uptight man” who in
“Breitensträter–Paolino” “does not like washing naked in the mornings, and
who is inclined to express surprise that a poet who works for two and a half
connoisseurs earns less money than a boxer who works for a crowd of many
thousands”. In the duel of possible selves that this piece stages, the
“uptight man” embodies Nabokov’s fear of his own shadow; while the narrator
embodies the cruelty incited by that fear.

THOMAS KARSHAN

Breitensträter – Paolinoby Vladimir Nabokov

Everything in the world plays: the blood in the veins of a lover, the sun on
the water, and the musician on a violin.

Everything good in life – love, nature, the arts, and family jests – is play.
And when we actually play – whether we’re knocking down a tin battalion with
a pea or drawing together across the net barrier in tennis – what we feel in
our very muscles is the essence of that play which possesses the marvellous
juggler, who tosses from hand to hand in an unbroken sparkling parabola . .
. the planets of the universe.

Man has played as long as he has existed. There are ages – holidays of
humanity – when man is especially impassioned by games. So it was in bygone
Greece, in bygone Rome, and so it is in our own Europe of today.

A child knows, that in order to play to his heart’s content, he must play with
someone else or at least imagine somebody, he must become two. Or to put it
another way, there is no play without competition; which is why some kinds
of play, such as those gymnastic festivals in which fifty-odd men or women,
moving as one, form into patterns across a parade ground, seem insipid,
since they lack the very thing which gives play its entrancing, exciting
charm. Which is why the Communist system is so ridiculous, since it condemns
everyone to doing the same tedious exercises, not allowing that anyone be
fitter than his neighbour.

Not for nothing did Nelson say that the Battle of Trafalgar was won on the
tennis and football fields of Eton. [Sic.] And the Germans too have lately
realized that the goose step can only take you so far, and that boxing,
football and hockey are more valuable than military or any other exercises.
Boxing is especially valuable, and there are few spectacles as healthy and
beautiful as a boxing-match. An uptight gentleman, who does not like washing
naked in the mornings, and who is inclined to express surprise that a poet
who works for two and a half connoisseurs earns less money than a boxer who
works for a crowd of many thousands (a crowd which, by the way, has nothing
in common with the so-called masses and is possessed of a rapture far purer,
more sincere, and goodnatured than that of the crowd welcoming home its
national heroes), this same uptight gentleman will feel indignation and
disgust towards a fist fight, just as in Rome, most likely, there were
people who frowned at the sight of two huge gladiators demonstrating the
very best in the gladiatorial arts, slugging each other with such iron blows
that not even the “pollice verso”1 was necessary,
they’d finish each other off anyway.

What matters, of course, is not really that a heavyweight boxer is a little
bloodied after two or three rounds, or that the white vest of the referee
looks as though red ink has leaked out of a fountain pen. What matters is,
first, the beauty of the art of boxing, the perfect accuracy of the lunges,
the side jumps, the dives, the range of blows – hooks, straights, swipes –
and, secondly, the wonderful manly excitement which this art arouses. Many
writers have depicted the beauty, the romance of boxing. Bernard Shaw has a
whole novel about a professional boxer. Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Kuprin
have all written on the subject. Byron – the darling of all Europe, except
fastidious England – was a great friend of boxers and loved to watch
their fights, just as Pushkin and Lermontov would have loved it, had they
lived in England. Portraits have survived of the professional boxers of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The famous Figg, Corbett, Cribb fought
without gloves and fought masterfully, honourably, tenaciously – more often
to the point of utter exhaustion, than to a knockout.

Nor was it commonplace humanity that led to the appearance of boxing gloves in
the middle of the last century, but rather a desire to protect the fist,
which could otherwise be too easily broken in the course of a two-hour bout.
All of them have long since stepped down from the ring – those great,
legendary pugilists – having won their supporters quite a few pounds
sterling. They lived to a ripe old age, and in the evenings, in taverns,
over a pint of beer, they would talk with pride of their former exploits.
They were followed by others, the teachers of today’s boxers: the massive
Sullivan, Burns, who looked like a London dandy, and Jeffries, the son of a
blacksmith – “the white hope”, as they called him, a hint that black boxers
were already becoming unbeatable.

Those who had hoped that Jeffries would beat the black giant Johnson lost
their money. The two races followed this fight closely. But despite the
furious enmity between the white and black camps (the event took place in
America twenty-five or more years ago), not a single boxing rule was broken,
even though Jeffries, with every one of his blows, kept repeating: “Yellow
dog . . . yellow dog”. Finally, after a long, splendid fight, the enormous
negro struck his opponent so hard that Jeffries flew backwards from the
platform, over the encircling rope and, as they say, “fell asleep”.

Poor Johnson! He rested on his laurels, gained weight, took a beautiful white
woman for his wife, began appearing as a living advertisement on the
music-hall stage, and then, I think, ended up in jail, and only briefly did
his black face and white smile flash out from the illustrated magazines.

I have had the luck to see Smith, and Bombardier Wells, and Goddard, and
Wilde, and Beckett, and the miraculous Carpentier who beat Beckett. That
fight, which paid the winner five thousand, and the runner-up three thousand
pounds, lasted exactly fifty-six seconds, so that someone who had paid
twenty pounds for their seat had only enough time to light a cigarette, and
when he looked up at the ring, Beckett was already lying on the boards in
the touching pose of a sleeping baby.

I hasten to add that in such a blow, which brings on an instantaneous
black-out, there is nothing grave. On the contrary. I have experienced it
myself, and can attest that such a sleep is rather pleasant. At the very tip
of the chin there is a bone, like the one in the elbow which in English is
called “the funny-bone”, and in German “the musical-bone”. As everyone
knows, if you hit the corner of your elbow hard, you immediately feel a
faint ringing in the hand and a momentary deadening of the muscles. The same
thing happens if you are hit very hard on the end of the chin.

There is no pain. Only the peal of a faint ringing and then an instantaneous
pleasant sleep (the so-called “knock-out”), lasting anywhere between ten
seconds and half an hour. A blow to the solar plexus is less pleasant, but a
good boxer knows just how to tense his abdomen, so that he won’t flinch even
if a horse kicks him in the pit of the stomach.

I saw Carpentier this week, on Tuesday evening. He was there as trainer to the
heavyweight Paolino, and it was as though the spectators did not immediately
recognize the recent world champion in that modest, fair-haired young man.
His glory is now dimmed. They say that after his fearsome fight with Dempsey
he sobbed like a woman.

Paolino appeared in the ring first and, as is customary, sat down on a stool
in the corner. Huge, with a dark square head, and wearing a splendid robe
down to his heels, the Basque resembled an Eastern idol. Only the ring
itself was lit, and in the white cone of light falling from above, the
platform looked like silver. This silvered cube, which was in the middle of
a gigantic dark oval, where the dense rows of countless human faces called
to mind kernels of ripe corn strewn across a black background, – this
silvered cube seemed lit up not by electricity, but by the concentrated
force of all the gazes fixed upon it out of the darkness. And when the
Basque’s opponent, the German champion Breitensträter, stepped onto the
platform, fair-haired, in a mouse-coloured robe (and for some reason in grey
trousers, which he immediately proceeded to pull off), the enormous darkness
trembled with a joyful roar. The roar did not die down when the
photographers, jumping onto the edge of the platform, pointed their
“monkey-boxes” (as my German neighbour called them) at the fighters, at the
referee, at the seconds, nor when the champions “pulled on their boxing
gloves” (which makes me recall “the young oprichnik and the valiant merchant”2).
And when both opponents threw off their robes (and not “velvet furs”) from
their mighty shoulders and rushed towards each other in the white shimmer of
the ring, a light moan passed through the dark abyss, through the rows of
corn-kernels and the misty upper tiers – for everyone saw that the Basque
was much bigger and bulkier than their favourite.

Breitensträter was first to attack, and the moan turned into an ecstatic
rumble. But Paolino, hunching his head into his shoulders, answered him with
short hooks from below, and from almost the first minute the German’s face
glistened with blood.

With every blow that Breitensträter took, my neighbour sucked in his breath
with a whistle, as if he himself were taking the blows – and all the
darkness, all the tiers croaked a kind of enormous supernatural croak. By
the third round it became noticeable that the German had weakened, that his
punches could not push off the hunched orange mountain that was moving
towards him. But he fought with extraordinary courage, trying to make up,
with his speed, for the fifteen pounds by which the Basque outweighed him.

Around the luminous cube, across which the boxers danced with the referee
twisting between them, the black darkness froze, and in the silence the
glove, shiny with sweat, slapped juicily against the live naked body. At the
beginning of the seventh round Breitensträter fell, but after five-six
seconds, jerking forwards like a horse on black ice, he stood up. The Basque
fell upon him immediately, knowing that in such situations you must act
swiftly and decisively, and put all your strength into your punches, for
sometimes a blow that is stinging but not firm will, instead of finishing
off your weakened opponent, enliven him, wake him up. The German bent away,
clinging onto the Basque, trying to win time, to make it to the end of the
round. And when once more he went down, the gong did in fact save him: on
the eighth second, he got up with great difficulty, and lugged himself to
his stool. By some kind of miracle he had survived the eighth round, to
mounting peals of applause. But at the start of the ninth round Paolino,
striking him beneath the jaw, hit him just as he had wanted. Breitensträter
collapsed. In frenzy and discord, the darkness roared. Breitensträter lay
twisted like a pretzel. The referee counted down the fateful seconds. Still
he lay.

And so the match came to an end, and when we had all emptied out onto the
street, into the frosty blueness of a snowy night, I was certain, that in
the flabbiest family man, in the humblest youth, in the souls and muscles of
all the crowd, which tomorrow, early in the morning, would disperse to
offices, to shops, to factories, there existed one and the same beautiful
feeling, for the sake of which it was worth bringing together two great
boxers, – a feeling of dauntless, flaring strength, vitality, manliness,
inspired by the play in boxing. And this playful feeling is, perhaps, more
valuable and purer than many so-called “elevated pleasures”.

Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan.

* 1 The pollice verso was the gesture of turning the thumb made by a Roman
crowd to pass judgement on a defeated gladiator.

2 This, and the subsequent quotation in the paragraph, are both allusions to
Lermontov’s “Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich: A Young Oprichnik and the
Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov” (1837). The oprichniks were Ivan the
Terrible’s notorious enforcers.

Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan have translated Nabokov’s early five-act
play The Tragedy of Mister Morn; read Lesley Chamberlain, on the first
English reading of this tragedy that “marked the death of playfulness”, here